Power Rangers vs Godzilla

Rating: 6/10 (3 January 2014)

I'm not a fan of brainless movies. There are very few exceptions and I decided to give Pacific Rim a chance since it was made by an apparently desperate for work Guillermo del Toro playing well outside his comfort zone. His familiar insectoid imagery is briefly present, but for the most part this is new, and unsuitable, ground for him. I understand that he just had to get a big movie done after leaving the Hobbit and so many false starts for his adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness (a film that doesn't really need to exist as John Carpenter's The Thing is about as close as you can get to it) though Pacific Rim was the wrong script to choose.
Set in the near future a portal between our universe and a universe filled with giant monsters opens up beneath the ocean and said monsters barge through and cause mass destruction. Yup, it's yet more 9/11 porn, a sub-genre that was already tiresome and overdone before this movie even came out.
In order to fight the monsters the world government builds giant mechs to dish out a good old clobbering, sometimes with the help of a handy container ship just sitting nearby. The mechs are piloted mainly by twins or by close siblings who can symbiotically fight back using opposite hemispheres of the brain. As expected there is conflict between the pilots and disrespect for authority in between smash-ups.
The actors are mainly cursory as without them the movie would be entirely CGI. The Japanese chick is hot, but Charlie Hunnam is neither good nor terrible, and I really don't understand the hype built around Idris Elba. The only ones I liked were Ron Perlman's black market dealer and Charlie Day as the excitable scientist.
At 131 minutes the movie is overlong and there are a few small scenes that could have snipped. With a careless $190 million dollar budget Pacific Rim was lucky to not bomb as bad a predicted. This really, really is not intelligent sci-fi. It's braindead, candy-colored mayhem for angry teens with ADHD. I am so surprised that del Toro would make a movie like this, the material is beneath him.